the power of song...

i had the lovely fortune yesterday to take a yin yoga class, a style i find extremely challenging, not because it's slower and requires surrender instead of striving, but because of the effective and immediate way it releases what bodyworkers call, 'issues in the tissues...' 

as a person at ease with ideas and abstractions but less fluidly graceful with emotions, its like swimming without knowing how... you feel overwhelmed and inclined to struggle until you decide to have faith and float. the teacher had invited a guitarist who was noodling quietly in the background until the very last pose when he broke out into cohen's hallelujah... i don't believe in angels, but, for me, it was like an angel had come into the room through this young boy's voice. i instantly unraveled, not out of sadness, no. i was moved to tears by the sheer power of the singing voice, the way it reaches inside people to touch them in a way other medias can't.

there's little need for me to point out the obvious, that contemporary music has so very much lost touch with this fact but moved headlong into the other extreme of mostly pointless escapism, adding its bit to a new social norm that prefers to see us cynical except for our thrill to consume, hard-hearted except for our own wants and wishes, and immune to responsiveness except those that keep us lubricated cogs in the machine.

i feel so grateful to've been at the right place yesterday to get touched by human song like that, who doesn't appreciate such gentle, synchronous reminders? its so damn easy to forget the simple things, like why we first started singing to each other in the first place...